A series of human errors caused an airliner to run out of
fuel and crash in Colombia last month, killing 71 people including most
of a Brazilian soccer team, aviation authorities said on Monday.

Colombia's Civil Aeronautics agency concluded in its investigation
that the plan for the flight operated by Bolivia-based charter company
LaMia did not meet international standards. Among the errors made were
the decisions to let the plane take off without enough fuel to make the
flight safely and then to not stop midway to refuel. The pilot also did
not report the plane's emergency until it was too late, it said.

Neither the company nor Bolivian authorities should have allowed the
plane to take off with the flight plan submitted, said Freddy Bonilla,
air safety secretary for Colombia's aviation authority. He said the
agency's preliminary conclusions were based on the plane's black boxes
and other evidence.

Experts had earlier suggested that fuel exhaustion was a likely cause
of the Nov. 28 crash that wiped out all but a few members of the
Chapocoense soccer team, as well as team officials and journalists
accompanying them to a championship playoff match in Medellin, Colombia.

The BAE 146 Avro RJ85 has a maximum range was 2,965 kilometers (1,600
nautical miles) - just under the distance between Medellin and Santa
Cruz, Bolivia, where the plane had taken off at almost full capacity.

The plane was in the air for about 4 hours and 20 minutes when air
traffic controllers in Medellin put it into a holding pattern because
another flight had reported a suspected fuel leak and was given
priority.

Investigators found that crew members of the LaMia flight were aware
of the lack of fuel but waited too long to report the emergency.

Bonilla said that during the flight the pilot and co-pilot are heard
on "various occasions" talking about stopping in Leticia - a city near
the borders separating Brazil, Peru and Colombia - to refuel but decided
not to do so. When the plane entered Colombian airspace it was flying
into a wind, which caused more fuel to be consumed.

And when the pilot asked for priority to land in Medellin, six
minutes before crashing, the plane had already spent two minutes with a
motor shut off, the investigation concluded. All the motors shut down
minutes later.

In a recording of a radio message from the pilot, he can be heard
repeatedly requesting permission to land due to a lack of fuel and a
"total electric failure." A surviving flight attendant and a pilot
flying nearby also overheard the frantic pleas from the doomed airliner.

In addition, there was no explosion upon impact, pointing to a scarcity of fuel.

Investigators in Colombia concluded that the plane did not have the
fuel reserves required by international standards for such a flight.
They said there was no evidence of sabotage or mechanical failure.

Authorities also detected an excess of baggage, but did not relate it
to the accident, and, according to its plan, the flight was expected to
reach 30,000 feet, an altitude the plane was not certified for.

Details of the complete report by Colombia's aviation agency will be
released in April 2017. Bolivia, Brazil and the United Kingdom
contributed to it.

Bolivia's government has already blamed the airline and its pilot for the accident.